Parents soon find out that young children are natural learners. They are like explorers or research scientists busily gathering information and making meaning out of the world. Most of this learning is not the result of teaching, but rather a constant and universal learning activity as natural as breathing. Our brains are programmed to learn unless discouraged. A healthy brain stimulates itself by interacting with what it finds interesting or challenging in the world around it. It learns from any mistakes and operates a self-correcting process.
We parents achieve the amazing feats of helping our children to talk, walk and make sense of the home and the environment in which it is set, by responding to this natural learning process. All this is achieved, with varying degrees of success, by us so-called amateurs - the parent or parents, and other care-givers such as grandparents.
The highly sophisticated activity of parents is described as 'dovetailing' in to the child's behaviour. Parents, frequently the mothers for the largest share of the time, have no pre-determined plan of language teaching, we simply respond to the cues provided and give support to the next stage of learning as the child decides to encounter it. What we discover as parents is that, if supported and encouraged, children will not only begin to make sense of their world, but can also acquire the attitudes and skills necessary for successful learning throughout their lives.
But, this process of natural learning can be hindered or halted by insensitive adult interference. Sadly, the schools available to us, whether state or private, are often based on an impositional model which, sooner or later, causes children to lose confidence in their natural learning and its self-correcting features, and instead, learn to be dependent on others to 'school' their minds. In the process, E. T. Hall wrote in 1977, "Schools have transformed learning from one of the most rewarding of all human activities into a painful, boring, dull, fragmenting, mind-shrinking, soul-shrivelling experience."
A prize-winning New York teacher, John Taylor Gatto, describes this kind of schooling as training children "... to be obedient to a script written by remote strangers ... Education demands you write the script of your own life with the help of people who love or care about you."
The consequence is that parents wanting an effective and morally healthy education for their children based on natural learning principles, are in the same position as people wanting more healthy, vegetarian or vegan diets, or non-smokers wanting clean air in public places, or investors wanting to invest their money in ethical rather than exploitative ways, or people wanting to save the environment from further and possibly terminal destruction.
The system is not in the habit of providing any of these things and often has a vested interest in providing the opposite. So, like the vegetarian pioneers, the non-smoking rights movement and the environmental protection groups, parents wanting education that respects natural learning principles, will have to argue and organise to try to get it.
There are at least three options. One is to find one of the rare examples of humane schools free from domination, (often, but not necessarily, small in size). Ivan Illich describes these as 'convivial' institutions rather than 'coercive' ones. A second is to fight a rearguard action of damage limitation by deliberately providing alternative learning at home in out of school hours, and maintaining a continuous critical dialogue with children about the schooling experience. Since my son chose to go to school rather than have home-based education, this was my own path. He grew to argue that 'school is a wreck, but I can find bits of treasure in it.' A third option is to join the fast-growing minority, (grown from about ten families in England and Wales in 1977 to about 10,000 families at present), who undertake home-based education and increasingly establish co-operative family learning centres to support their endeavours.
From the Roland Meighan column in Natural Parent no. 2 December 1997
2. Dyslexia and the obsession with literacy
A few years ago, I invited trainee teachers to visit home-educating families to see what they might learn from such an experience. One young woman visited a family where all four children, two boys and two girls, were diagnosed by the unit at the University of Aston as dyslexic in varying degrees of severity. The trainee teacher herself had a first-class honours degree from Oxford University.
Yet in her written evaluation of her day spent with the family she wrote that the children made her feel completely uneducated. How could this be? She would be described conventionally as highly educated because she was highly literate. She explained that for every academic skill she possessed, they had three or four practical skills. They could, amongst other things, grow their own food, make their own clothes, cook and bake, keep bees, dismantle and rebuild cars and service them, put a roof on a house, build walls, install central heating systems, milk goats, and keep hens. They could also talk to her about her political studies of pressure groups because they were active in groups such as Friends of the Earth.
The parents had adopted an unusual approach to the dyslexia of the children. It was 'accentuate the positive and ignore the negative'. They had a learning approach that concentrated on activities that children could do with success and left aside reading and writing to develop later. Years later, all are competent, composed and flexible adults whose company is most agreeable. They can turn their hands to a variety of ways of earning money. They can all cope with reading and writing with varying degrees of achievement. One is fluent, and three are competent, despite a warning from the Aston University Unit that one, possibly two, might never learn to read.
The response of the trainee teacher about feeling uneducated raises some important issues. Has literacy, in the form of reading and writing, become an obsession or even a superstition? John Holt, the American writer and teacher, made this observation:"From the fuss we make about reading, one might think that this was a country of readers, that reading was nearly everyone's favourite or near favourite pastime. Who are we kidding? A publisher told me not long ago that outside of 300 or so college bookstores there are less than 100 true bookstores in all the United States."
George Trevelyan observed that "education has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading." His point is supported by the finding that the best-selling newspapers are tabloids with a reading age of about 11 years. Surveys have shown that this even holds for a majority of teachers.
The time and effort spent on teaching reading also flies in the face of the facts that it usually takes about 30 hours to learn, provided that it takes place in a learner-friendly environment. This figure comes from Paulo Freire's work with illiterate peasants in South America where he logged the progress of cohort after cohort of reading classes. Those home-schoolers who have also logged progress, report similar results. If it takes longer it can be because inhibitions have been built in by the learning situation. The more time devoted to forcing the pace, the greater the opportunity cost, so that the skills the dyslexic family had gained, that so impressed the trainee teacher, are squeezed out. In any case, illiteracy is a common experience: we are all illiterate when we arrive in foreign countries. Yet we manage to cope, using our intelligence and benefiting from the help and tolerance of the natives.
In the end, however, we come back to the main reason for literacy. The economic motive of 'for the good of the economy', which is constantly stressed by governments, did not impress the survivor of a concentration camp:
"Dear Teacher,
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should
witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers,
Children poisoned by educated physicians
Infants killed by trained nurses,
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates.
So I am suspicious of education.
My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmans.
Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human."
Finally, recent technology has come to the aid of many dyslexic people. Voice-driven computers have been shown to be effective in 90% of the cases in the research undertaken by Aptech Ltd who have developed the software in this country. Indeed, the arrival of voice recognition technology is likely to move us gently and inevitably into a new oracy age. This technology breaks the domination of print literacy. Of course, books and other reading material will still be useful and will not disappear, but their domination is gone. Machines can read and write for us. This can be occasionally, or most of the time, or all of the time, just as we choose and according to the situation.
To some extent the decline of the use of print for information and entertainment has already started and has been replaced by TV and radio, for more and more adults and children. The development of advanced telephone technology, including the arrival of mobile telephones, has already had the effect of moving activities away from the print literacy skills into more use of oral skills. An obvious example is the growth of telephone banking. Next, the arrival of book-reading technology for blind people, is equally usable by the sighted with reading difficulties. There are more developments to come, such as the use of virtual reality and the next generation of wallet-size computers.
Thus, the move from an era of the domination of print-based literacy into a new era where oral literacy will be more central, is already under way, even if its significance has not yet been widely recognised. As a case in point, this article was written, (or should it be 'voiced'?) using Dragon Naturally Speaking software supplied by Aptech. I find it to be a kind of magic when you see your voice turned into accurate print, and I am not dyslexic. For those with dyslexia, it must seem like a liberation.
Notes
Aptech Ltd are specialists in voice-based systems and may be contacted by telephone on 01661 860999. They supply Dragon Naturally Speaking software for £170.
The Burntlands Consultancy, Upper Rochford, Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire WR15 8SH specialises in tuition for dyslexics by dyslexics. Telephone 01584 781 341. Operating as a not-for-profit service, their charges are modest, and an initial consultation and demonstration at Upper Rochford, minimum duration one hour, costs £50.
(A shorter version of the above article by Roland Meighan was published in Natural Parent in February 1998.)
3. Parents as researchers
Twenty educationalists including home-schoolers, headteachers, industrialists and researchers, met at the University of Nottingham last Autumn. They spent two days exchanging ideas on the theme of education in the year 2020. One thing everybody agreed on straight away was that the climate of uncertainty, due to continuous change, would not go away. 'Continuous adaptation' was here to stay.
In this situation, parents will have to become active members of the learning society themselves, and become constant researchers. By this, I do not mean writing research papers, but asking questions and sifting evidence and any offered answers. Tolstoy suggested that the only real objective of education was to create the habit of continually asking questions. (Governments are not always disposed to agree, finding passive minds more acceptable.)
There is another reason why parents need to become researchers. A few years ago, a student on a Master Degree in Education course became wearied by the constant procession of research studies presented week after week. He asked me to tell him what, in my opinion, all the studies told us in the end. I asked for time to think about it. Next week I gave a verdict. "What they tell us," I declared, "is that we do not know how to do it. We do not know how to educate children in a complex and changing world. If we knew, we would not have to research it any more. All the research is doing is trying to find useful clues."
This statement still holds. But we do have more and better clues than before. But it means that parents do not have to believe over-confident teachers and educationalists, just as patients do not have to believe over-confident nurses and doctors. We can sift the evidence for ourselves, especially with the aid of magazines like What Doctors Don't Tell You and Natural Parent!
Asking questions may lead to unexpected conclusions and actions. Those reluctant educational heretics, the home-schoolers, decided that they could make decisions based on their experience and the available evidence, that were at odds with 'professional' opinion. They may have even come to the same conclusion as George Bernard Shaw who proposed that "all professions are conspiracies against the laity", well, some of the time anyway, if not most of the time in some cases.
One danger of parents thinking for themselves is that they may be regarded as eccentric. We can take comfort from the words of Bertrand Russell when he said that we should not fear to be eccentric in thought, because every idea that is now taken for granted, was once said to be eccentric. It is not the case, however, that being unorthodox guarantees that you are right. There are many possibilities for error, and plenty of unorthodox ideas are dubious, or prove to be just plain wrong.
Becoming a researcher is a permanent state because in the situation of continuous change, solutions are likely to be temporary expedients. The task might often the to decide the lesser of evils rather than achieve any certain answer. Or the task may be to replace familiar skills with new ones. The computer field illustrates this well. When I wrote a book with my Amstrad 8256, I thought learning all the new skills was well worthwhile. Before long I needed to learn again to work with a PC and Word for Windows. Now I am learning yet again to take on the new skills needed for my voice-driven computer.
One shortcut for parents to become well briefed in educational ideas is to be found in the use of quotations. For example, when Mark Twain said that he "never allowed schooling to interfere with his education", he drew attention to a number of propositions. One is that schooling and education are not the same thing, and can often be entirely opposed. Another is that your own private investigations, conducted in your own time and in your own way, can be valid education. Indeed, one of the reasons why schooling and education can be in opposition is that the questions and concerns of the learner can gradually become replaced by the official questions and concerns imposed by others and, even more oppressive, the officially approved answers.
For a second example, take the quotation from George Bernard Shaw when he says: "What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child." This quotation alerts us to a fundamental objection to a national curriculum or any adult imposed curriculum. It turns learning into a 'child-hunt' where knowledge hounds the child rather than a 'knowledge-hunt' where learners are encouraged, supported and advised in their seeking out of knowledge. Because I found quotations to be such a powerful aid to thinking, I compiled a book of quotations on education. People tell me it is useful to stimulate discussion, question assumptions, and expose myths and superstitions.
Another shortcut is the use of analogies. When people say that we should learn and memorise things which may be useful to us in the future, we can try to think of other examples when things are done now in the hope that they may be useful later. The activity of squirrels comes to mind. They collect nuts, bury them and then try to locate them later. Are we being asked to believe that children should collect adult-designated nuts of information, then bury them in their memory, in the hope that they may need to dig them out later? Is this the most effective way to spend time?
For another analogy, Edward Fiske, former New York Times Education Editor, concluded that getting more learning out of our present schooling system was "like trying to get the Pony Express to beat the telegraph by breeding faster ponies." An analogy like this alerts us to the ancient nature of the mass schooling and its growing obsolescence due to slowness to adapt. Perhaps tinkering with the system is like getting the stagecoach to go faster by strapping roller skates on the hooves of the horses, when what is needed is a new kind of transport altogether, such as a railroad.
It helps to locate useful sources of information, but I think it was Winston Churchill who said it is better to read wisely than widely. You could read every newspaper every day, but I doubt if it would be worth the effort, and it is better to choose one that does not insult your intelligence. Natural Parent is one useful source, and ACE Bulletin from the Advisory Centre for Education, set up to advise parents, is another. I think Education Now News and Review is also good, but I must declare a vested interest here.
Finally, the title of 'parents as researchers' is, perhaps, misleading. It
might well read 'families as researchers' since adults and children alike
will need this mentality to cope with our ever-changing world and our own
slow-to-adapt schooling system. In addition, purposive conversation among
family members and others, about these and any other matters, is one of the
most effective methods of learning we know.
(A shorter version of the above article by Roland Meighan was published in Natural Parent in March 1998.)
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4. Educational Superstitions of our time - Shakespeare, Maths and Handwriting
Professor S. Bengu, The Minister of Education for South Africa, gave a keynote speech at a conference on democratic education last May. In it explained his country's intention to move away from a bureaucrat-driven imposed curriculum towards a learner-driven curriculum by 2005.
The enthusiasts for imposing a curriculum on the learners are often horrified at such heresy. "What if the learners do not choose to learn Shakespeare?" I always thought that Bertrand Russell gave the cool answer here, when he said: "Shakespeare did not write with a view to boring school-children; he wrote to with a view to delighting his audiences. If he does not give you delight, you had better ignore him."
I always found comfort in this view, since I admit that, despite many visits to performances at Stratford-on-Avon, I can take or leave the bard. This does not mean I want to stand in the way of those who want to encounter Shakespeare, and for this reason, I find that the work of John and Leela Hort in making the language of his plays intelligible, is well worth both parents and children investigating. With their love of the bard, Leela and John have spent their time and money producing the Inessential Shakespeare series, 'shortened and simplified versions in modern English', a snip at £2-95 each. Five plays have been translated into modern English so far, and the sixth, Hamlet, is in preparation ready.
The enthusiasts for imposing a curriculum on the learners are also worried by Maths. "What if the learners do not choose to learn Mathematics?" Bertrand Russell, who should have a valid opinion since he was one of the world's most renowned mathematicians himself, had this to say on the matter: "In universities, mathematics is taught mainly to men who are going to teach mathematics to men who are going to teach mathematics to ... Sometimes, it is true, there is an escape from this treadmill. Archimedes used mathematics to kill Romans, Galileo to improve the Grand Duke of Tuscany's artillery, modern physicists (grown more ambitious) to exterminate the human race. It is usually on this account that the study of mathematics is commended to the general public as worthy of State support."
Maths is useful, however, if you are doing something like designing bridges, but the idea that we must all go through the Maths experience to identify those who are good at it and need it later for specific tasks, is about as sound as saying we must all study dentistry to enable some expert dentists to emerge. When I was learning Maths at school, then teaching it in school myself, and then watching my son learn it, the same heretical thought kept occurring, that surely there are better things we could all be doing than this.
It is a common error to confuse mathematics with arithmetic, and so perhaps it is the latter that should be imposed? Again, Russell is a dissenter: "Arithmetic ... is overvalued; in British elementary schools and it takes up far more of the time than it should. He goes on to propose that there are much more useful things to learn. Russell admitted that although he was a leading mathematician and philosopher, he was never much good at arithmetic himself.
It is another common error to think industry has 'needs' that can be 'covered'. A colleague who was a Maths tutor, conducted a survey of the 'needs' of hundreds of firms around Birmingham. When I asked him what he had found, he said, "Total confusion." He could not find any common requirements in mathematics, and the common ground as regards arithmetic amounted to knowledge and confidence in the four basic rules. This squares with my own experience because when I left school at 16 and went work in a bank, my 'O' level Maths proved to be pretty useless and I had to learn the number games of the bank on the spot.
One home-educating family, where the father was an engineer, asked me at a conference what to do about Maths. I ran through the arguments. They decided it was a superstition, and to have the courage to ignore it unless it cropped-up in the course of other investigations. Later they said how pleased they were with this policy and how well it had worked out in practice. But then, with CD-ROM interactive discs now available that will teach you 'O' level Maths in a quarter or less of the time of a taught course, you can take the subject on board whenever you wish.
If I believed in compelling people to learn things, which I no longer do since I advocate the learner-driven/catalogue curriculum approach instead, I could make out a much better case for teaching Logic which is usually missing from the curriculum altogether. But it was Paul Goodman, in a book that shocked people in 1962 entitled Compulsory Mis-education, who described mass schooling, including its imposed mathematics, as a mass superstition.
The enthusiasts for imposing a curriculum on the learners are also worried by joined-up handwriting. "What if the learners do not choose to learn joined-up handwriting?" I must admit to being much more worried if they do not develop the skills of joined-up thinking that learning logic encourages, but that is another issue. Perhaps more pain is inflicted on children in the joined-up handwriting pursuit than any other. Yet printers print in script because it is clearer. Natural Parent would be hard work to read if it were presented in handwriting
Nobody shows much enthusiasm for joined-up figures in sums either, and would see anyone as a bit odd for suggesting it. John Holt in his investigations could find no reasons on offer except a claim that joined-up handwriting was speedier. He showed that this usually was a fallacy by conducting a number of classroom experiments and by experimenting on himself. Usually, script was as quick or often quicker, more legible and looked better. Those who chose to learn Italic script produced very attractive results.
In discussion recently, one handwriting enthusiast told me that the body movements used in the teaching of it were essential for the composed development of children. This was her justification for teaching handwriting. If this is so, why not teach the body movements on their own without the clutter?
The enthusiasts for imposing learning on children in school do not have a good track record. There were earlier superstitions. For a time they tried to make all left-handed children become right-handed, with a heavy punishment regime. Drill was imposed as a subject on all children for many years. Children in Welsh-speaking areas of Wales were punished if they did not speak in English in school. Later compulsory Welsh appeared in English-speaking parts of Wales and I have met adults who resented this being enforced on them as children. And so on.
Part of the task of 'parents as researchers' that I advocated in a previous edition of Natural Parent, is to be on the look-out for learning systems based on possible superstitions and get equipped to answer them and deal with them. In later editions I intend to analyse two big superstitions - 'socialisation', and then 'subjects'.
The Inessential Shakespeare Series is available from 239 Bramcote Lane, Wollaton, Nottingham NG8 2QL Telephone 0115 928 3001 for a brochure.
A version of this piece was published in Natural Parent in April 1998, as the Roland Meighan column, entitled 'The three myths'.
5. Where does the bully mentality come from?
The problem with most discussions about bullying is that it is concerned with the immediate 'first aid' problem of how to deal with the latest outbreak of persecution. There are now plenty of books, booklets and articles that try to deal with this, (see Kidscape details that follow), so I intend to look beyond the symptoms to the causes of the disease.
The root causes of bullying are usually overlooked or passed off as some weakness of character. Alice Miller, in books like For Your Own Good, however, proposes that people learn the bully mentality. She concludes from her research that 'every persecutor was once a victim'. She shows how every member of the Third Reich had the same kind of upbringing and education based on unrelieved domination, and she calls this 'the poisonous pedagogy'.
But, I want to come closer to home than Hitler's regime. School in UK, based on the current model of the compulsory day-confinement centre, is itself a bully institution. In a democracy, nobody is supposed to be detained against their will unless they have committed an offence. So, what is the offence that children have committed to justify detention? It would appear to be that their 'offence' is that they are young.
Having confined children by compulsion, apart from those who opt for home-based education, schools employ a bully curriculum - a compulsory National Curriculum or some other imposed programme. We could employ a democratic curriculum if we wanted to, and the catalogue curriculum, which offers a more-or-less unlimited range of learning possibilities and is learner-driven, is just such an approach.
Just how ingrained is the idea of adults imposing their ideas of 'proper' learning is indicated when a school does it differently. Sudbury Valley High School in USA has no timetable and no lessons until the learners request them or set about organising them. It operates a learner-driven curriculum.
The bully curriculum is enforced by the increasingly favoured bully pedagogy of teacher-dominated formal teaching. Alice Miller's view that this is a 'poisonous pedagogy' is supported by others. Rosalind Miles entitled her book The Children We Deserve. Paul Goodman chose the title of Compulsory Mis-education and Chris Shute used the idea of Compulsory Schooling Disease.
In another book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, John Gatto Taylor, has the following to say: "I began to realise that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behaviour."
He decided to change his style of teaching, to give children space, time and respect and to see what happened. What happened was that the children learnt so much that he was nominated teacher of the year for the New York State several times.
Gatto recognised that what he was really paid to teach was a hidden or unwritten curriculum. He decided it was made up of seven basic ideas. The first was confusion. He was required to teach disconnected facts not meaning, infinite fragmentation not cohesion, and a tool kit of superficial jargon rather than genuine understandings. The second basic idea was class position. Children were to be taught to know their place by being forced into the rigged competition of schooling. A third lesson was that of indifference. He saw he was paid to teach children not to care too much about anything.
The fourth lesson was that of emotional dependency for, by marks and grades, ticks and stars, smiles and frowns, he was required to teach children to surrender their wills to authority. The next idea to be passed on was that of intellectual dependency. They must learn that good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do and believe. The sixth idea follows on from this - the teaching of provisional self-esteem. Self-respect is determined by what others say about you in reports and grades. People learn to be told what they are worth and self-evaluation is ignored. The final, seventh lesson is that you cannot hide. You are watched constantly by teachers, parents and other students and privacy is frowned upon.
Responses to his analysis are predictable, Gatto says, the assertion that there is 'no other way': "It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students' parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things."
School, Gatto concludes, is a twelve year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. School 'schools' very well but it hardly educates at all. All this schooling, however, is good preparation for being gullible to the other institutions that control us, e.g. television,
Currently the school system in UK is reinforced by the bully compulsory assessment system and an aggressive school inspectorate. The unwritten, but powerful message of this package, is adults get their way by bullying, There are at least three types of outcome to this model of schooling. The 'successful' pupils grow up to be officially sanctioned bullies in dominant authority positions as assertive politicians, doctors, teachers, civil servants, journalists and the like, and start their own career as persecutors.
Next, a majority of the 'less successful' learn to accept the mentality of the bullied - the submissive and dependent mind-set. Such people need someone to tell them what to think and do, because they have been prevented from learning how to do 'joined-up' thinking.
A third outcome is the production of a group of free-lance bullies who become troublesome and end up in trouble of varying degree of seriousness. Until we replace this domination model with a different model, the root causes of bullying will continue. As Jerry Mintz reports from the USA scene: "American kids like watching violence on TV and in the movies because violence is being done to them, both at school and at home. It builds up a tremendous amount of anger... The problem is not violence on TV. That's a symptom... The real problem is the violence of anti-life, unaffectionate, and punitive homes, and disempowering, deadening compulsory schooling, all presented with an uncomprehending smile."
We can do better than schooling based on domination and I applaud the work of those teachers like John Gatto Taylor who begin to move away from domination towards participation, power-sharing and democratic relationships (see also Trafford below). They organise schools councils that work. They have parental involvement that is genuine. They devise lesson and classrooms based on co-operative principles. They make it possible for children, in the words of my son, "to find bits of treasure in the wreck." But, knowing it is a wreck is crucial to positive survival in it. As one young person said after reading a book of educational quotations, "Now I know that there are other people who think school is crackers, I can cope with it."
* * * * *
Parents faced with problems of bullying at school can find help in: Preventing Bullying: A Parent's Guide by Kidscape. Send large SAE for a free copy from Kidscape, 152 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 9TR
This piece was published in Natural Parent in June 1998, as the Roland Meighan column, entitled 'Where the bullying starts'.
6. Learning systems
When I trained as a teacher I was introduced to two basic roles. One was that of crowd-control steward, since a great deal of time is spent dealing with large groups of conscripted learners. Conscripted learners, like conscripted slaves, are not likely to be automatically pleased about their enforced activity, and therefore need marshalling. As Colin Ward once explained, "Much of our expenditure on teachers and plant is wasted by attempting to teach people what they do not want to learn in a situation that they would rather not be involved in".
The other basic role was that of crowd-instructor. This is having a revival as the current officially favoured method of trying to achieve learning using the formal instruction of groups in classes of anything from 30 -50.
The most impressive crowd-instructor I witnessed personally was the head of the school in which I did my first teaching after college. He would take the whole school of 500 to 600 secondary pupils in the hall for two hours at a time for hymn-singing and mental arithmetic, armed only with a pianist and a cane, so that the staff could complete the end of term reports. Standing on the terraces at the West Bromwich Albion ground one Saturday, I was joined unexpectedly by the head, Harold Tyas. At half-time, I expressed my admiration for his performance as a formal teacher with the whole school as his class, and confessed I never saw the day when I could emulate his achievement. His response surprised me. He told me not to be impressed because he had grown to realise that his methods did not lead to any worthwhile education. He said that he appointed young teachers from college in the hope that they would find much better ways than his.
Enthusiasts for the crowd-instructor role ignore the evidence about its inefficiency. The short-term recall of learners after formal instruction averages 10% with a usual range of 0% to 20%. The long term recall averages 5% with a usual range of 0% to 10 %. As a young teacher, I simply refused to believe the evidence and threw myself into a whole host of strategies to prove the figures wrong. The pre and post-test results showed again and again that the research was correct. This set in motion my life-long interest in learning systems.
Three other learning systems get better results. These are not the only ones; there are other approaches that help us match the thirty different learning styles we have found in humans. Some promising new approaches are based on computer technology using interactive video and CD-ROM discs.
The first of the three is purposive conversation between two and up to eight people. This is one of the reasons that home-based education is so remarkably successful, in getting the learners, on average, two years ahead of their schooled counterparts and in some cases, up to ten years ahead. Between 40% and 60% of the time is spent in purposive conversation which replaces the inefficient crowd instruction method. We now know this after over 20 years of research in UK, USA, Canada, Australia and elsewhere.
A second effective learning approach is that of teaching something to someone else. This is one of the reasons why people are so easily fooled by formal teaching methods. Because the teacher remembers up to 90% of the material, it is easy to assume that the learners do too. They do not. When they fail to do so, the disappointed teacher cannot face the idea that it is the method that is poor and is likely to blame the learners for being 'lazy' or 'stupid'. It is, of course, the teacher who could be accused of being both lazy and stupid for not reading the research on learning. The explanation for the much-vaunted Pacific-rim results using formal methods, is in the small print: learners do two hours work with their parents before school and two or more afterwards, to shore up the inefficiency of the crowd instruction method. If they followed the example of home-schoolers and cut out the bit in the middle, they might do even better.
A third successful method is that of learning co-operatives using the discipline and skills of democratic pedagogy. I was startled to find a considerable leap in standards when I first used this approach in teacher education courses. So were the external examiners and inspectors who, never having encountered this approach, knew nothing of its theory or practice. As well being successful in the standard tasks of memorising and reproducing institutionally approved material, the students also developed bonus skills in resourcefulness, flexibility, curiosity, skill in learning, readiness to unlearn, research techniques and enhanced personal confidence.
They found that they annoyed their alienated fellow learners on other PGCE courses, by their enthusiasm and joy in learning. Colleagues were also known to comment sourly when the students from the learning co-operative attended any of their lecture sessions, that they "asked an awful lot of questions".
Home-schoolers exhibit the same extra bonus skills, and one reason is that the families too, operate as learning co-operatives for periods of time. When students from the learning co-operatives visited families educating at home, they immediately found common ground. So when the famous Harrison case was in court in 1981, they supported the family during the hearing and produced a simulation that they could use in classrooms based on it.
The next learning system, which is only a few years away, and indeed could be in place in months if we had a mind to do it, is unlikely to need either of the roles of crowd control steward or crowd instructor very much. We are, therefore, training teachers for an increasingly obsolete system and creating a cohort of new, young museum-pieces.
The obsolete teachers being produced, are, in the final analysis, being trained as indoctrinators. We need to move from working ON children, which is the approach of the indoctrinator, to working WITH children, which is the approach of the educator. It is time to ignore those who have enthusiasm for the domination-riddled approach of the massive and expensive apparatus of National Curriculum, testing systems and aggressive inspection. Instead, we must learn from the astonishing success of the home-schoolers, about how we might construct a more humane, dignified, and cheaper learning system. Along with this will go a different, enhanced and more professional and worthy role for teachers as learning coaches and consultants rather than crowd control stewards and crowd instructors - 'cops without uniforms', as the USA teacher John Holt used to put it.
Roland Meighan
This piece was published in Natural Parent in June 1998, as the Roland Meighan column, entitled 'The cop without a uniform'.
7. What is a good teacher?
People are often shocked to find that there is no agreement about 'good' teaching. One view stresses that a good teacher is in the business of making themselves redundant. The American educator, John Holt, put it like this:
"a good teacher teaches you how to teach yourself better."
So the task of the teacher is to make themselves unnecessary as soon as possible.
Another view stresses the teacher as instructor, taking decisive action by using crowd control skills to organise learners. Then, using crowd instruction methods, the teacher tries to get the learners to memorise a particular piece of information or achieve a required understanding. This tends to be the officially approved view of 'good' teaching, that underpins the whole imposed apparatus of the National Curriculum, the Testing System and the OFSTED inspection ideology.
The third view sees the good teacher as supporting the growth of learning groups who direct and manage their own learning:
"Of a good teacher, they say, when the task is done, we did this ourselves!"
Actually, Lao-tse was talking about the characteristics of good leaders, but I suggest it applies to this particular view of teaching too.
There is a further definition of a good teacher - one who stimulates another person's researches. Most of the 'my best teacher' articles that I have read use you the second model of 'teacher instructing me'. I must confess that I find these kind of articles rather repetitive and tedious. In contrast to this constant admiration for the instructor-teacher, my 'best' teacher hardly spoke to me directly, apart from the usual pleasantries of 'hello', 'good-bye', and 'how are you?'. He was the Co-operative Society Insurance Agent. He made our house his last call on a Saturday, since he knew that he would be certain to get a cup of coffee and a lively discussion with my father. I learned to make it my business to be in the room, reading or working, to listen in on these conversations, because new and exciting ideas were constantly being introduced. Charlie would mention a book, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist by somebody called Robert Tressell. I would go to the library and investigate. Next time, he might mention a radical theologian named Peter Abelard, which meant another trip to the library. On another occasion he would quote a guy called Bertrand Russell, so that meant another search along the bookshelves. A person named Tom Paine apparently wrote an interesting book called The Rights of Man, so that needed checking out. On the subject of ghosts, he talked about the research activity of the ghost-busting British Psychic Research Association. I needed the assistance of the librarian to track this one down.
Charlie was a self-educated man, a evening classes attender I would guess, and had no formal qualifications to my knowledge, but I think he was the best educated person I ever met. He exemplified the character in Wesker's Roots who declared that 'education is asking questions all the time'. Yet he seemed entirely content with his work in the Co-operative Movement. None of the topics he stimulated me to look into, ever seemed to be on the agenda at school, and I had no reason to believe that any of the teachers would even welcome their introduction.
Another version of 'good' teaching is one who waits to be asked. Holt proposed the dictum of 'no question, no teaching'. Unless someone has asked a question, there is no mandate for teaching. One school, Sudbury Valley in USA, takes this seriously, so there is no timetable unless the learners organise or request some systematic learning activity. That this idea alarms or perplexes people tells us how our assumptions about good teaching have been absorbed from a very narrow range of ideas. I saw it in action when studying the learning activity of some home-schoolers.
When Robert Owen, who was another person Charlie used to mention, established the first infants school at New Lanark, he was criticised for his appointment of a particular teacher. He passed over somebody with good literacy skills for a person less proficient. Owen explained the prime requirement for a good teacher, was that "they were fit company for children." The more highly qualified person failed his prime requirement.
If we applied this exacting requirement to present-day teachers, the current estimates of 10% failing teachers might well be considerably inflated. If I think of all the teachers I worked with, this would certainly be true, though discretion prevents me from trying to quantify it. Perhaps it is as well that the present Chief Inspector of Schools applies different standards of judgement.
The next generation of teachers that are needed for the next learning system, however, may well be judged by the Robert Owen requirement. In his book, In Place of Schools, John Adcock predicts that teachers in the next century will be quite different to those in the present. They will need to be learning coaches, learning advisers, and learning agents. They will need good interpersonal skills, consultancy skills, and computer research skills, in order to help the members of the families on their case-load 'plan, do, and review', their personal learning programmes. They will need to be ' fit company for learners.' The skills of crowd control, and crowd instruction that dominate the behaviour of present day teachers, will not be much in evidence.
(A version of this appeared in the Roland Meighan column of Natural Parent magazine, Sept/Oct 1998)
8. A superstition called socialisation
A study of factors contributing to the development of people of high achievement was undertaken by H.G.McCurdey at the University of North Carolina, USA. It was reported in George Leonard's book Education and Ecstasy. Such people often come to be known as genius. Three factors were identified. One was a high degree of individual attention given by parents and other adults and expressed in educational activities and accompanied by abundant affection. A second factor was an environment rich in, and supportive of, imagination and fantasy. The third was only limited contact with other children but plenty of contact with supportive adults.
McCurdey concluded that in mass compulsory schooling, based on formal methods and rigid organisation, we have a long-running experiment in reducing all the above three factors to the minimum. The result is the suppression of high achievement.
Bertrand Russell started his own school at Beacon Hill when he decided that none of the available schools were the kind of places fit for his children, or anybody else's for that matter. He himself had been home-educated. In retrospect, however, he declared that his Beacon Hill school was not as successful as he had hoped. One reason he gave was that he seriously over-estimated the amount of time children need in the company of each other.
15.000 hours is a long time to be forced to spend in the company of a selected number of your peers, yet adults persist in declaring that it must be worthwhile socialisation. It may be socialisation, but the quality of it is highly suspect. Here are some recent newspaper items that touch on the theme.
Report one: Children now expect bullying to be a regular feature of school life. A national survey commissioned by Family Circle magazine showed that eight out of 10 have suffered at least one sustained attack. On average, the first bullying experience can now be expected at the age of eight.
Report two: A report commissioned by the Suzy Lamplugh Trust showed that weapons on now carried by one in ten school students. We can be relieved that UK is still behind in the international league tables, however, since in the USA, knives and guns are carried by far more students than this. But the trend is upwards and complacency is not justified.
Report three: Primary schools are to be issued drug guidelines by the Head Teachers Association. Solvent-sniffing is now found to be common amongst children as young as 7. The HTA claimed that schools were choosing to sweep the problem under the carpet by not informing the police, in order to protect the reputation of the school. The peer group in primary schools is now a key source of information about the drugs scene for children in school. Later, as the youngsters grow older, it will supply information about such things as smoking, alcohol, ecstasy tablets, junk food, and expensive teenage fashion.
Report four: The Secretary of State for Education has launched a crackdown on truancy. He sees it has a 'disengagement from education'. The crackdown was proposed as a measure to combat social exclusion. "Exclusion from what?" you might be tempted to ask. "Weapons, or drugs, or bullying?"
One of the great supporters of school as socialisation was the USA educationalist John Dewey, but he wanted schools to be democratic in style, with high levels of participation and power-sharing, not the totalitarian style based on domination and imposition. The domination model of most of our schools was not part of his plan. He saw the best kind of school as a larger-scale version of the learning approach of the best of the pioneer families of USA.
Yet there is still surprise when a family decides to opt out into home-based education! "What about the social life?" they cry. A reply based on the evidence rather than superstition is, "Exactly! It is well worth avoiding!" Another reply might be that we are a nation of slow learners who cannot work out the significance of report, after report, after report, on the negative socialisation of schooling.
Home-schooling families actually create a much higher quality of social life in their practice of family-centred education, in three ways. First of all they use the home as a springboard into the community using libraries, museums, places of interest in both town and country. In the process they rub shoulders with people of all ages. Whilst this is going on, their schooled counterparts are confined to classrooms with a limited range of peers and a limited range of adults.
Secondly, they locate and join groups such as Scouts, Guides, and Woodcraft Folk, as well as groups or classes in judo, swimming and other sports, or natural history and other pursuits.
Thirdly, they seek out other home-schooling families and do things in co-operation. They may be on an occasional basis, or as in the case of more and more groups, on a weekly basis. London thus has The Otherwise Club meeting two days a week for families to join in if they wish.
But another issue related to the socialisation superstition is discrimination against loners. At parties I have often found myself talking on the side to another person who finds the social attention-seekers getting rather wearing and the endless flow of social trivia getting increasingly boring. I have found that loners often turn out to be more interesting, composed and reflective people and, indeed, some of the most prolific contributors to ideas have been of this disposition. So if your child seems content with their own company - and yours - it is not an automatic cause for concern. Indeed, UK housing policy has just come to terms with the fact that more and more people choose to 'go solo' and this has created a growing demand for single dwellings.
Loners in school can often become the target for bullying because the normal expectation generated by the socialisation superstition, is that you will allow yourself to be taken over by the peer group. This assumes that the artificially created peer group of school is actually worth joining. In the boys grammar school I went to, I judged it was not, and preferred to make my own circle of friends away from the school. Being useful at sports, however, kept me in touch with the peer group without having to be taken over by them. Others were not so lucky.
A head teacher friend provides a final angle on socialisation. He says that the main reason the parents ask for the school to keep its school uniform is because it is protection against the lethal combination of market forces and peer group pressure, which force young people to ask for expensive trainers and other fashion-led items of clothing!
(A version of this appeared in the Roland Meighan column of Natural Parent magazine, Nov/Dec 1998)
9. Wanted! A new vocabulary for learning
The latest edition of the Journal of Curriculum Studies opens with a powerful article by a leading curriculum theorist, Bill Reid, about 'the end of curriculum'. Previously, In Place of Schools was the title of a book by John Adcock published in 1994, thus declaring the word 'school' redundant. We need, therefore, a new vocabulary to take us into the next learning system. This is not a matter of mere debate but of necessity. The shape of the next learning system has to be described in new words to convey the new approach, but also in words that make sense to parents.
But first, the old vocabulary has to go. The first casualty has to be 'school'. As a word and concept it has degenerated. It used to mean a voluntary association of learners asking questions and seeking the truth. In earlier times, when scholars (or 'schoolers') like Peter Abelard travelled from town to town, an informal 'school' of enquirers would assemble for a dialogue about his radical ideas. Somehow this idea of a voluntary gathering of learners has become debased. In his classic book, Life in Classrooms, Philip Jackson concluded that: "for all the children some of the time, and for some other children all the time, the classroom resembles a cage from which there is no escape". We need to remember that when mass compulsory schooling was first adopted in the USA, the children of the pioneer families were escorted to the state establishments by armed soldiers against the will of the families concerned. Currently, in the UK it is hailed as an advance that police cars are used to round up any reluctant learners. The undesirable outcomes are that, somehow, schools have transformed learning from one of the most rewarding of all human activities into a dull, fear-laden, boring, fragmenting, mind-shrinking, soul-shrivelling and often painful experience.
Next, the word 'curriculum' has to go. It has come to mean an imposed course study so dehumanised that all the key decisions about what to learn, when to learn, and how to learn, have been taken before any of the learners have been met and encountered as people. At one point in the National Curriculum deliberations it was suggested that we refer to 'curriculum study units' or CSU's rather than pupils, as a final dehumanisation. Bill Reid, in the Journal of Curriculum Studies, declares that this idea of curriculum, as a nationally institutionalised form of education, is now played out. Even the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, with his somewhat conservative interpretation of 'education, education, education' being synonymous with 'schooling, schooling, schooling', has stated that, "we will move away from a system that assumes every child of a particular age moves at the same pace in every subject, and develop a system directed to the particular talents and interests of every pupil."
Another word that may have to go is 'education'. Quite a few years ago, Bertrand Russell observed that we were faced with the paradoxical fact that education had become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and to freedom of thought. In common usage, education has ceased to mean 'asking questions all the time, questioning answers all the time, and questioning the questions'. Instead it has become a paper-chase. When you are asked about your education, you are expected to produce a list of set courses completed and certificates obtained, or name the place of conscription that you were required to attend.
Next, officialdom's favourite word may have to go. It is 'standards'. The idea of standards in education is both ambiguous and subjective. For some it means remembering the information designated by adults in power positions as 'essential', even though there is little agreement on what is essential. Training students to be good at the shallow learning of selected mechanical tasks enshrined in institutionally imposed syllabuses, does not produce the more important deep learning, the kind we already need, and will need more and more in the future. The first objection to shallow learning systems is that they tend to eradicate the potential to develop a deep learning, as the most recent brain activity research shows, on the principle of 'if you do not use it, you lose it'. With the habits of deep learning in your repertoire, you can do shallow learning more or less at will. The reverse, however, does not apply.
Another objection to the current definition of standards, is that most of the required shallow learning is 'junk knowledge'. I defined junk knowledge as 'something you did not need or want to know yesterday, do not need or want to know today, and are unlikely to need or want to know tomorrow.' If you do need or want to know it eventually, possessing the deeper knowledge of such things is questioning, researching, evaluating, self direction and self discipline, will enable you to learn it.
So, parents and children will need to un-learn the old vocabulary and learn a new one. The literature on the next learning system has several suggestions for a word to replace school. Some writers talk of open learning centres, or learning studios, or learning pavilions, or learning networks, or community learning sites, or learning cafes. Another option is to refer to centres for personalised education, or CPE's. Others want to retain the word school in revised formulations such as 'virtual-schools' or 'cyber-schools'. For a time I favoured 'flexi-schooling' but generally, schools proved to be resistant to the idea of becoming flexible.
The main candidate to replace the word curriculum, is the expression 'personal learning plan' or 'personal learning programme'. Personally, I favour retaining the word curriculum as part of the expression, the catalogue curriculum. Such a term implies that learners are able to construct their own pattern of learning from a catalogue of ideas and possibilities, including ready-made courses, individualised courses, and support for groups of learners who want to work democratically and design their own courses.
To replace the word education, many writers now favour referring to 'learning', or 'lifelong learning'. So, the talk is about the next learning system rather than the next education system. Even the word 'system' is sometimes questioned on the grounds that it implies mechanical imposition. But if we actually, or mentally, prefix the word with flexible - a flexible learning system - it helps people see that what is being proposed is a not a free-for-all or laissez-faire. A system can also be monitored, although the purpose of that monitoring will be to provide high quality advice and information, so that learners can make informed decisions, rather than the motive of the imposition of uniformity and standardisation.
The word and idea of standards chosen and imposed from above, can be replaced by the idea of profiles of personal achievement, which have worked in other European countries, such as Denmark and Sweden, for decades. These can include generalised assessment tests by personal choice.
A recent MORI poll, commissioned by the Campaign for Learning, found that 90% of adults were favourably inclined towards further learning for themselves. In the right environment, they were willing to undertake further learning. The bad news is that 75% said they were unhappy and alienated in the school environment, and that, therefore, they preferred to learn at home, in the local library, at their workplace - anywhere other than a school-type setting. The old vocabulary and thinking just has to go, and not just in this country. As Edward de Bono says on his web-site:
"I have not done a full survey or review of education systems around the world so that the views I express are based on personal experience. I would say that all education systems I've had contact with are a disgrace and a disaster." My verdict is the same, though some are more counter-productive than others. They are all deserts and we should not allow ourselves to be confused because we encounter the occasional oasis along the way.
(Published in Natural Parent magazine, Jan/Feb 1999, under the title of 'New words for learning')
10. Purposive conversation and effective learning
We live in an age of continuous change and the constant revision of knowledge. So, I proposed in an earlier column, that we parents need to become constant researchers. This means noting any useful ideas in new books. Here are three that challenge, inform and develop new interpretations about education. On the face of it, they are about 'full-time' home-based education, but they all ask fundamental questions about education in general. And since we are all 'part-time' home-based educators in the gaps around school hours, they apply to us all.
The most recent one is Educating Children at Home by Alan Thomas (Cassell, 1998), a psychologist interested in individualised learning methods. Since schools have a poor track record in individualisation, he turned to home educating families in both Australia and the UK where individualised learning is 'business as usual'. But what impressed Thomas was the amount that occurred largely through social conversation with an adult. He noted a remarkable amount of spontaneous incidental talk. Personally, I prefer to call this 'purposive conversation' to distinguish it from ordinary social exchanges. Thomas reminds us of the research that shows that high achieving 'genius' children have a background of both individualised attention and purposive conversational learning, which are found to be major factors in their accelerated intellectual development.
The research of Alan Thomas is based on a hundred home educating families. He shows that at home, lessons are concentrated and intensive. Little time is spent on the distractions that absorb so much time in classrooms. With increased efficiency lessons are short and often confined to the mornings only, and this leaves plenty of time for extra purposive conversation. Not all families use formal lessons and they then give over even more time to purposive conversation.
Next, learning home becomes an interactive process rather than a series of tasks to be tackled. Therefore, any mistakes that are made, rather than creating barriers to learning, becomes steps on the route to enlightenment. In this interaction, concepts are acquired, skills improved and new knowledge is gained doing the course of concrete, everyday activities or through topics that have captured the learners' interests. Parents and children can be unaware of the efficiency and power of their learning regime. Parents remarked that it was only when they looked back over a period of time, or kept a careful record, that they could see just how much high-quality learning had taken place.
Thomas reports that, "the initial worries which home educators have concerning social development gradually fade as they see their children growing up, confident and relaxed in adult company and able to relate to children of all ages." Parents come to see that it is actually the school that is cut off from the real world.
The research concludes that home educators give us a view of education which, in many respects, is markedly different from what is on offer in school. Their approach has the potential to bring about the most fundamental change in education since the advent of universal schooling in 19th-century. But we will need a new kind of institution in place of schools to bring this about.
The second book is Strengths of Their Own: home schoolers across America by Brian D. Ray (N.H.E.R.I publications, 1997). In a mere 139 pages packed with information and analysis, Dr. Brian Ray, director of the USA National Home Education Research Institute, presents the results of his recent study of home-based education. He took a USA nation-wide sample of 1657 families and their 5402 children, and all 50 states were represented. The results support his earlier findings that indicate that home-based education is the best option available, and that schooling, whether private or state, is now the second best choice. Michael Farris, of the Home School Legal Defence Association, is quoted as saying that:
"... parents who take personal responsibility for the education and socialisation of their children reap a harvest of exceptional children who are well prepared to lead this country into the next century."
The growth of home-based education in the USA seems unstoppable. At first, it was estimated that the numbers would flatten out at one percent of the school-age population. Now that it has forced its way past five percent in various States, some think it may peak at 10%. But good news is infectious, and others now predict that 50% of all children within a generation, will be learning in home-based education, for a significant portion, probably 50 %, of their school-age time.
The research identifies the positive outcomes of home-based education on topics as varied as students academic achievement, social and psychological development, and the performance of the home-educated when they become adults. Adults who were home-educated are, typically, in employment rather than unemployed, independent-minded and entrepreneurial in outlook, and think positively about their previous home education experiences.
The study explodes the 'lack of socialisation' myth. Children were engaged in a wide variety of social activities spending, on average, 10 hours a week in such things as music classes, play activities outside the home, sporting activities, church organised groups, Scouts and Guides.
In an earlier study, 58 percent of families have computers in the home. In Ray's latest study, this has risen to 86 percent. The children use computers for educational purposes, but the only subject to which there was a significant positive difference, was reading, since those using computers scored higher in reading tests.
A personalised, self-designed curriculum was used for 71 per cent of the students rather than a set, purchased package. The programme selected a variety of elements from the information-rich society in which we now live, including some pre-packaged items. Ray, like Thomas, explores the methods of learning and also identifies purposive conversation, as a key reason for the success of home-based education.
Ray suggests that home-based education may eliminate, or at least reduce, the potential negative effects of certain background factors. He shows that the success of the home educated is unrelated to low family incomes, low parental educational achievement, parents not having formal training as teachers, race or ethnicity of the student, gender of the student, not having a computer in the home, starting formal education late in life, or being in a large family. He explodes another myth - that home-based education is for the well-off. The average family earnings for home-educating families was below the national average.
Finally, there is the intriguing indication that 'the family that learns together, stays together'; home-educating families show signs of being more stable, with their members more fulfilled and happy as a result.
The third book is The Art of Education: reclaiming your family, community and self, by Linda Dobson, (Home Education Press, 1995). For Linda Dobson, school erases key abilities such as curiosity, imagination, creativity, inner peace, humour, artistry, self-motivation, and intuition. In return, school offers "indoctrination in accepted ideas".
School develops bad habits, Dobson observes, and a notable one is learning to rely on experts to solve problems for us. For Dobson, home-based education is family-centred education where the members grow into self-reliance and healthy scepticism of experts and professionals. It uses the principles of natural education which require only a guide to provide encouragement, support, some direction, and a learner ready to discover and create goals and values that are personally meaningful. In appendix A to the book, the list of famous adults who were home-schooled includes seven presidents of the United States and various scientists, inventors, authors, explorers and business people.
In proposing that the government way is an inadequate one, and that family-centred education is superior, Dobson sets about exploding various myths about home-based education. She does this by describing a day in the life of a home educator. All the wealth of learning she lists, are "accomplished in the warm, loving, safe environment of home! No bells, no tests, no peer pressure, no competition! Individual attention, individual progress, individual choice! The art of education - pure, stressless, naturally occurring ... "
We learn how the Dobson family began home-based education. The oldest child's brief stint in public school kindergarten had already revealed a number of worrying features. There was the stress of formal book learning begun too soon. Then there was the behaviour-altering effects of peer pressure. Next, there was the personality-altering effects of school discipline. Finally, there was the dispiriting effects of boredom and irrelevance.
Home-based education worked for the children, but also expanded the life of Linda Dobson: "As the children acquired basic skills - reading, writing, arithmetic - their interests expanded. So did mine. Their sense of wonder blossomed. So did mine. Their abilities multiplied. So did mine. Their confidence increased. So did mine." Some friends were impressed but protested that they could not cope with being with their children all day long. They failed to see that the irritating behaviour of their children is a consequence of schooling. Other friends worried about the cost, but the sum of money needed is flexible, especially now that we live in an information-rich society with plenty of free resources available.
Another gain was a strengthened family life. "Our institutions still give lip-service to the family as the first and most important building block society. But by destroying the natural cycle of love and respect, inherent in family life through their demands that children 'socialise' in artificially inflated institutional settings, they are contributing to the destruction of society itself." Human beings, she declares, are capable of wise decision-making when they are not paralysed by authoritarian hierarchies or impersonal structures that diffuse individual responsibility.
The radical thought is developed that education could be improved with one simple reform - eliminate schools. Instead, establish learning centres dedicated to meeting the unique needs of all the learners who took up the invitation to attend. Several examples of these learning centres are described: Paris, Lexington Virginia, Providence Rhode Island, and Kansas City, and the Centre for Personalised Education Trust is supporting the founding of such centres in UK.
(Published in Natural Parent magazine, March/April 1999, under the title of 'Talk that's far from cheap')
* * * * *
[There is a fourth book, also by Linda Dobson, which is of particular interest to anyone actually starting or considering full-time home-based education. It is The Home Schooling Book of Answers: the 88 most important questions answered by home schooling's most respected voices (1998). All the books listed above are obtainable from HERO Books, 58 Portland Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 5DL Telephone 01273 775560]
Roland Meighan - January 1999
11. Back to the Future?
Headline: Chief Inspector of Schools Condemns National Curriculum!
"I am ashamed to have been a party to it," he says.
Teaching has become a debased activity according to the Chief Inspector of Schools:
"In nine schools out of ten, on nine days out of ten, in nine lessons out of ten, the teacher is engaged in laying thin films of information on the surface of the child's mind and then after a brief interval he is skimming these off in order to satisfy himself that they have been duly laid".
These observations of the Chief Inspector of Schools, made in the early 1900s, can hardly fail to sound a controversial note in the UK today. At present it is quite hard for anyone to suggest that there may be more to education than a ceaseless quest for a better way to force-feed information to children.
But the man who was responsible for supervising the first National Curriculum of the early 1900s, was the Senior Chief Inspector, Edmond Holmes. He wrote a report in which he condemned all that he had been doing for the last thirty years, and admitted his sense of shame for being a part of it. He had to resign as a result of telling the truth as he saw it. He went on to write two books establishing his case, but his inconvenient views were quietly buried. "He appears in histories of education as a footnote, or as one whose ideas are acknowledged but never allowed into the main current of thinking, either in his own time or later," writes Chris Shute in his recent book Edmond Holmes and the Tragedy of Education.
If England wanted to have an education system fit for a new century, Holmes declared, it would have to stop telling children what to do and compelling them to do it, since this produced only passivity, lassitude, unhealthy docility or, in the stronger, more determined spirits, 'naughtiness'. Uniformity was just plain bad education.
Holmes wrote of the "tendency (of the examination system) to arrest growth, to deaden life, to paralyse the higher faculties ... to involve education in an atmosphere of unreality and self-deception." He called this system a source of 'infinite mischief' which obscured the true purposes of education.
One of the most disturbing features of the current educational scene is the likelihood that we shall now enter the next century with the same basic model of mass, uniform, conscription-based schooling that Holmes saw as a tragedy. The battery-hen, 'tell them then test them' approach still reigns supreme. Holmes was a committed Christian and saw all this as unchristian; if God had intended us for uniformity, we would have been created so, as in the case of ants or bees. Therefore he saw the imposition of a uniform curriculum on children by adults as an affront to his religion.
Holmes was not the only whistle-blower. Bertrand Russell wrote: "There must be in the world many parents who, like the present author, have young children whom they are anxious to educate as well as possible, but reluctant to expose to the evils of existing educational institutions." Also, Albert Einstein observed that, "It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail."
Another whistle-blower, Winston Churchill had this to say on the matter: "Schools have not necessarily much to do with education ... they are mainly institutions of control where certain basic habits must be instilled in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school." Education officials responsible for the drafting of 1988 Education Reform Act, which re-established the 1904 form of curriculum, also wanted 'institutions of control' for they were recorded as saying: "We are in a considerable period of social change. There may be social unrest, but we can cope with the Toxteths. But if we have a highly educated and idle population we may possibly anticipate more serious social conflict. People must be educated once more to know their place."
Are there any current glimmers of hope? Well there are several. The first and most radical is the home-schooling movement which, on based on the growth rate of the last 20 years, is now expected to account for 25% of the USA school-age population by the year 2008. UK appears to be running about five years behind.
The second is flexi-time. By 2008 there may be a further 25% on flexi-time arrangements - 65,000 families are reported as taking up the options of ISPs (Independent Study Programmes) this year, in California alone.
Thirdly, the Charter Schools movement has been growing apace in USA in the last five years, modelled on the Danish and Dutch models. Here groups of parents, sometimes in co-operatives with teachers, set up small schools or local learning centres with State aid. my USA colleagues tell me that President Clinton is strong in his support for this movement,
Fourthly, most USA States have made a start in replacing schools with All Year Round Education Centres which open eight in the morning until eight at night, every day of the year. These centres are able to offer much more flexibility in learning opportunities to fit the needs of individuals, families and adult learners and much more flexible contracts for teachers. These institutions are also in a position to offer ISPs .
A catalyst in these developments can be, and often is, communications and information technology (CIT) which enables the development of cyber schools, learning networks, virtual schools and other flexible, computer linked possibilities. CIT also allows initiatives with truants. In Japan, teachers communicate with truants using e-mail and multimedia technology, sometimes holding video conferences with the children. The feedback has so far been positive. Michael Fitzpatrick, in Times Educational Supplement, 10/4/98 reports that the approach stems from the view that bullying and the pressure to succeed are driving pupils to truancy. Bullied students who commit suicide inevitably become headline news.
Another glimmer of hope is contained in the words of Prime Minister Tony Blair that I mentioned in a previous edition: "... the revolution in business ... will, over time, take place in education, too. We will move away from a system that assumes every child of a particular age moves at the same pace in every subject, and develop a system directed to the particular talents and interests of every pupil."
These words carry a serious implication. If he can envisage a better system of learning, what are we waiting for? Are the present generation of young learners being fobbed off with a second-rate experience for no good reason? Why is he tolerant of the current Chief Inspector of Schools devoted to the regressive ideology of education based on fear and domination, that Holmes despised?
What can parents do about all this? Our local councillors, national politicians and journalists need to be educated about these things. Letters to newspapers asking questions about these matters, even when they are not published, help influence opinion and so do letters to MPs. Introducing these idea into conversations also helps. The growth of home-based education, for example, has taken place mostly by word of mouth and through a trickle of newspaper and magazine articles. Why not ask your MP about the words of Tony Blair and their implications? I would be interested to have copies of any replies.
Later this year, Falmer Press will be publishing a new whistle-blower book entitled National Curriculum, National Disaster by Rhys Griffiths, based on several years field work. There are strong echoes in this work of the denunciation of the first national curriculum by Edmond Holmes. Get hold of a copy, read it and start a debate about it.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead encourages us: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
(Published in Natural Parent magazine, May/June 1999, under the title of 'Putting children in their place')
* * * * *
Edmond Holmes and 'The Tragedy of Education' by Chris Shute, ISBN 1-900219-12-3, published by Educational Heretics Press, costs £7-95, from 113 Arundel Drive, Bramcote Hills, Nottingham NG9 3FQ
Roland Meighan, March 1999
12. The superstition of school 'standards'
'Standards' has become one of officialdom's favourite words. But the idea of standards in schooling is both ambiguous and subjective. I will illustrate this with a story. My colleague was in a primary classroom watching a child do the standard achievement tests. The boy was busy colouring in balloons - the more he coloured in the time allowed, the test decreed, the higher his achievement. He had coloured in three, whereas others had coloured in ten or eleven. He spoke to my colleague, sensing a sympathetic ear: "They say I am slow, but I say I am thorough." But who says speed is more worthy than thoroughness?
For some 'standards' means remembering the information designated by adults as 'essential' and therefore enshrined in syllabuses set by complete strangers. Training students to be good at this shallow learning of the selected mechanical tricks of institutionally imposed syllabuses, does not produce the more important deep learning, the kind we need more and more in the future. Shallow learning requires pattern-receiving, whereas deep learning requires pattern-making. Recent research on the brain notes that the brain we are born with is 'wired' or 'programmed' for pattern-making and so young children learn their mother tongue naturally by using this facility and not by the pattern-receiving activity of formal instruction. The brain has to 'rewire' to cope with regime of constant pattern-receiving and can lose it previous strengths in the process.
Observers like John Holt have concluded that children are less capable as independent learners after years of schooling than they were at the outset, partly because their pattern-making facility has been eroded. If he is right, we parents need to start thinking carefully about the experiences our children are having.
Indeed shallow learning systems do tend to eradicate the potential to develop deep learning, on the 'if you do not use it, you lose it' principle. The reverse, oddly enough, does not apply. With deep learning habits in your repertoire, you can do shallow learning more or less at will. With this in mind, some will define 'standards' as standards of deep learning. Thus Edward de Bono is well known for his advocacy of helping children learn to think straight as the first priority, and this is part of his reason for declaring all schooling systems known to him as disasters: "I have not done a full survey or review of education systems around the world so that the views I express are based on personal experience. I would say that all education systems I've had contact with are a disgrace and a disaster." Is this a Red Alert for us parents when our leaders keep telling us we must keep up with the others? On the other hand, the character CJ, in The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, used to declare, "I never got where I am today by thinking." Which vision do we want for our young, thinking people or gullible ones?
Standards and standardisation are closely related ideas. The philosopher John Stuart Mill warned us of the trap: "A general State Education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another, and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body." Now, this kind of schooling has always appealed to totalitarians. We entered this century with this kind of system and now the government proposes to enter the next with it, more or less, intact. Yet the Chief Inspector of Schools, Edmond Holmes was describing this kind of system as 'The Tragedy of Education' in 1911, and was fired for saying so.
Another objection to the current definition of standards is that most of the required shallow learning is junk knowledge. I define junk knowledge as, 'something you did not need or want to know yesterday, do not need or want to know today, and are unlikely to need or want to know tomorrow'. If you do need or want to know it at sometime, possessing the deep knowledge of such things as questioning, researching and evaluating will enable you to learn it. Indeed, we are all fated to live all our lives in ignorance of most of what is around us because the world of knowledge is now so vast and it is changing all the time. Without the research skills and some personal confidence derived from practising them, we cannot even make sense of what is necessary to our immediate well-being, and are forced to rely fatalistically on 'experts' who often fail to agree amongst themselves.
Those willing to impose their ideas of standards on others will sooner or later talk about 'the basics'. But the survivor of a concentration camp had this to say on the matter of basics: "Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human." His eyes had seen the results of a 'high standards' education system - gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. The manner of learning is as critical as the learning itself. Learning literacy in a bully institution makes you a literate bully.
But learning to read as early as possible, has become the latest superstition. The contrary view is that learning to read before you have learned to think effectively, just leaves you in a state of gullibility, a sitting duck for propaganda, the simplistic ideas of the tabloids and a multitude of spin doctors. This is why Robert Owen, industrialist founder of the first infants school, thought that ten years old was early enough to start the mechanics of reading. By that time the young would have had enough experiences, conversation, debate and exploration to have learnt to think straight. But we do not have to be inflexible about this. Pat Farengo, in his address to the London home-education conference in April, explained that his daughters had all learnt to read at different ages, one early, one about the common age of seven years and another several years later. Being a home-based educator, he was able to have the flexibility to stay cool about these individual differences.
Another basic we are asked to accept is the superiority of ruthless, competitive behaviours. Our leaders keep telling us that the next century requires this of us and have insisted that it be the first aim of schooling. Nat Needle, a US writer responds: "... if the 21st century becomes the story of human beings around the world pitted against each other in a struggle for well-being, even survival, this will only be because we failed to imagine something better and insist on it for ourselves and our children."
In contrast to the view that the victors in the 'strong versus weak' battle deserve our adulation for setting the pace for the rest of us, Needle reminds us of another view. It is that the strongest are those who devote themselves to strengthening the weak, to keeping the whole community afloat, to ploughing their gifts back into the common field through service to others. He concludes, "I don't care to motivate my children by telling them that they will have to be strong to survive the ruthless competition. I'd rather tell them that the world needs their wisdom, their talents, and their kindness, so much so that the possibilities for a life of service are without limits of any kind. I'd like to share with them the open secret that this is the path to receiving what one needs in a lifetime, and to becoming strong."
This extract from the current Living Green journal adds to this an alternative to relentless consumerism - the virtues of 'living lightly' - by saying: "try to live simply. A simple lifestyle freely chosen is a source of strength. Do not be persuaded into buying what you do not need or cannot afford. Do you keep yourself informed about the effects your style of living is having on the global economy and environment?"
In the first part of this century, Bertrand Russell observed: 'We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.' Since the model of education he described is the same as the one we still have, in all key respects, we parents and grandparents have to ask whether we are having imposed on us entirely the wrong standards.
(First published in the Roland Meighan
column of Natural Parent magazine July/Aug 1999
under the title of 'How your child can be a deep learner'.)
13. You become what you read?
It usually takes about 30 hours to learn the mechanics of reading, according to Paulo Freire, based on his work with adult literacy schemes in a variety of countries. This is confirmed in the experience of various home-based educators, though some would say it can take up to 60 hours with children. If learning to read takes longer than 60 hours, or fails altogether, there are several possible reasons. The first is that the learning situation is learner-hostile. A second is that the learner is not yet motivated to learn to read and has been forced to learn too early. A third is that the learner is dyslexic.
Robert Owen, the industrialist who founded an early infant school in 1816, inclined to the view that children should not be troubled with the mechanics of reading until they were about ten years of age. Until then they should be engaged in collecting a wide range of experiences of the world and in purposive conversation and debate, to develop their powers of critical thinking. In modern psychological terms, they were to develop deep learning of understanding before the shallow learning of mechanical operations.
Rudolph Steiner, on the other hand, was inclined to think that the age of seven was appropriate. The current orthodoxy is to start much earlier than this, ignoring the evidence that this risks early failure, feelings of inadequacy, and a general reaction against learning. But in London recently, Pat Farengo, a prominent USA home-schooler, explained how one of his daughters had learnt to read early, one at about seven years of age and the other much later at 10 years of age. All three were now competent and voracious readers. The flexibility that home-based education allows means that such individual differences can be accommodated.
Alan Thomas, in his recent book, Children Learning at Home, indicates how many home educating families experience this variety and cope with it positively. Parents, however, need the courage to resist any current orthodoxy, and also to deal with their own anxieties. My own son learnt to read early, and when he chose to try school at five years of age, he already had a reading age of twelve. I was, at the time, somewhat anxious that he had learnt to read too early, but not foolish enough to have discouraged him. A colleague who had the same 'problem' told me how the head teacher had thrown up her hands in horror, and told him that he and his wife had completely ruined his daughter's infant school experience by allowing her to read early. The disease of orthodoxy can strike in many forms!
Another current orthodoxy is to promote the teaching of reading by phonics, often confusing two variations, synthetic and analytical approaches, as the one right away. When my son was learning to read, I was also running reading workshops for young student teachers, and laid due stress on the need to pay attention to phonics, as did everyone I knew who was training teachers at the time. My son took to the Breakthrough to Literacy reading scheme with its personal word folders and personal word-building folders - this last being the analytical phonics element of the scheme. My son was politely but persistently dismissive of the word-building folder, and seemed to think this was a device to hold him back. He just wanted to know what any new word said and he would memorise it. From this experience, I began to learn to be more cautious about the use of phonics.
Another note of caution sounded. A colleague who went blind demonstrated his new reading machine to me. He would open a book, place it on the machine which would then read it to him. He explained that the development of the machine had been held up for several years because they tried to use a phonics-based approach. As a result of the machine could not attain fluency. Only when they switched to whole word recognition approach, with phonics as a backup to attack unfamiliar words, did the machine gain fluency. The machine appeared to be in sympathy with my son!
A recent experience has reconfirmed my caution. I began to learn Esperanto, an entirely phonetically regular language. In consequence I can read out loud to you a whole page of the language, but have only a little understanding of what I have performed so convincingly.
It may be that the general obsession with reading is becoming dated. The sale of books in the USA is in decline as more and more people get the information they need by electronic means. This includes television, radio, video, and telephone. Mobile telephones that link you to a data-bank, that then talks the information back to you, are increasingly becoming part of our experience. Telephone banking is but one example of this. Another is telephoned directory enquiries, and the telephone speaking clock has been with us for many years. Moreover, I am writing this article with a voice-driven computer. With an additional piece of software, the computer would read it back to me, to save me the chore of reading the screen. A long-standing friend who is severely dyslexic, Geoff Harrision, has been liberated by this technology, and now spends some time helping edit a magazine.
Looking ahead, the flight deck of the Star Ship Enterprise, does not utilise reading because all decisions are based on voice-dialogue with the ship's computer. The commander might be dyslexic - it would be of no consequence. We are moving steadily into a new age of oracy. Reading will continue to be useful, and for many a source of enjoyment, but probably less and less decisive. Even now, the gypsy culture in our midst manages without reliance on reading. We, ourselves, are often illiterate the moment we set foot in a foreign country, but somehow we get by.
We can often forget the dangers of reading. You can easily become what you read. If your reading does not go beyond the tabloid newspaper level, you become enslaved to the tabloid mentality, which has been described as superstitious, dogmatic, nationalistic and inclined towards racism, sexism and ageism. This idea was explored in full in Richard Hoggart's book The Uses of Literacy. Unless learners have developed the skills and habits of and discrimination, or 'crap detection', as Postman and Weingartner put it their book Teaching as a Subversive Activity, they are at the mercy of self-interested persuaders. Most learners pass out of school just literate enough to be conned, to be spun by the spin doctors, and to watch the more mindless shows on television.
We need to go way beyond mere mechanical literacy, to critical literacy where people can see through the linguistic, semantic, intellectual and other deceptions which now dominate our culture. Hoggart restated his points in a Guardian Education article (2nd December 1997):
"In a democracy, people have a right to read the Sun, and only the Sun, if they wish. But would you be happy if, by the time your own children and grown-up, they too 'read' only the Sun, watched only the more idiotic television programmes for almost 40 hours a week and, if they bothered with books it all, read-only formulaic market fodder? The founding principal of critical literacy ... must be to develop understanding of the nature of democracy itself, of the duties it lays on us and the rights we may then claim; the two are inseparable."
Hoggart is not impressed by the results of the reading industry so far: "But the great majority, insofar as they read at all, go round and round, wooed on to that carousel of repetitive rubbish ceaselessly operated by the two-syllabled press and the stereotyped paperbacks." Perhaps Robert Owen was less zany than we might think in wanting to leave the mechanics of reading until much later and develop the powers of critical thinking first.
(First published in the Roland Meighan column of Natural Parent, Sept/Oct 1999 under the title of 'the writing's on the wall'.)
14. The question of damage limitation:
and can 'organic and toxin-free' learning be a reality?
Every parent is a home-based educator until children reach the age of 5. After that, all parents are still home-based educators, although some are full-time, whereas others use schools for part of the time, during the weekdays, on those weeks the schools are open. For those who either choose to use schools, or necessity forces them to, I want to open up the question of damage limitation.
I had to face this question when, some years ago now, my son reached the age of 5. His mother, Shirley, was an experienced infants teacher, and I was an experienced secondary teacher and teacher educator. With our insider knowledge, we both understood the serious limitations of compulsory mass schooling, whether state or private, and set out to offer him a home-based education alternative. Ironically, he elected to try school, so his parents had to turn their attention to mounting a damage limitation programme.
Why was this necessary? A few years ago I wrote an article entitled "Schooling can seriously damage your education". I now think I was too cautious and should have entitled it, "Schooling will damage your education". The only question in my mind is how much damage will be done and in which dimensions.
There is some good news about schooling, however, as Everett Reimer indicated when he wrote, "some true educational experiences are bound to occur in schools. They occur however, despite school and not because of it." Some teachers manage, despite our domination riddled schooling system, to swim against the tide of restrictions and regulations, and create episodes of genuine humanity and genuine learning. I tried to be such a teacher and so did my wife Shirley. As my son put it, the good news was that he was able to find "bits of treasure in the wreck" of the schooling system, because of such teachers.
It is also true that the homes of some children are despotic or neglectful, so that even a coercive school provides a respite. Schools also provide a respite for parents from their children, so that they can pursue their careers, or whatever.
But the long-term effect of mass, compulsory coercive schooling is damage. As the New York prize-winning teacher, John Gatto put it, he was employed to teach bad habits. These ranged from bad intellectual habits, bad social habits, bad emotional habits, to bad moral and political habits. Neither the 'successful' pupils nor the 'unsuccessful' pupils escaped. For starters, he identified seven of these bad habits. I have mentioned them before, but I think they are worth repeating.
John Taylor Gatto recognised that what he was really paid to teach was an unwritten curriculum made up of seven ideas. The first was confusion. He was required to teach disconnected facts not meaning, infinite fragmentation not cohesion. The second basic idea was class position. Children were to be taught to know their place by being forced into the rigged competition of schooling. A third lesson was that of indifference. He saw he was paid to teach children not to care too much about anything. The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing: students never have a complete experience for it is all on the instalment plan.
The fourth lesson was that of emotional dependency for, by marks and grades, ticks and stars, smiles and frowns, he was required to teach children to surrender their wills to authority. The next idea to be passed on was that of intellectual dependency. They must learn that good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do and believe. The sixth idea is that of provisional self-esteem. Self-respect is determined by what others say about you in reports and grades; you are told what you are worth and self-evaluation is ignored. The final, seventh lesson is that you cannot hide. You are watched constantly and privacy is frowned upon.
The consequence of teaching the seven lessons is a growing indifference to the adult world, to the future, to most things except the diversion of toys, computer games, 'getting stoned' as the height of having a good time, and violence. School, Gatto concludes, is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. School 'schools' very well but it hardly educates at all. Indeed, Paul Goodman entitled his book Compulsory Mis-education. But all this is good preparation for being gullible to the other controlling institutions, such as universities, but especially television, a theme developed in Gatto's book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
In contrast, home-based education can be seen as analogous to organic farming – a system with the toxins avoided. Our 'damage limitation', however, meant 'building up the immune system' to fight the toxins of the schooling system.
Other parents were puzzled as to why we saw what they regarded as 'good' schools, which today would no doubt get OFSTED approval, as 'educational impoverishment zones'. 'A good uniform means a good school', they declared. 'And probably a bad education based on uniformity', we responded. John Gatto had an explanation for this puzzled response: "It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that ... only a small number can imagine a different way to do things."
So what did our policy of damage limitation look like? The first item was a principle: we would never pretend the school was right when it was wrong. If it proved necessary and with our son's approval, we would take the trouble to challenge the school when it was in the wrong, even if this meant we were labelled 'nuisance', 'interfering', or 'bad' parents. Part of this principle was never to shirk a dialogue with our son about what was happening in school and its implications. Thus, when a teacher, unable to find a guilty party, punished the whole class, we pointed out that this was a common fascist procedure, but also why the authoritarian system pushed teachers into this corner.
The second item was a positive programme of activities to offset some of the bad habits John Gatto identified. To some extent, we just continued the programme of activities used between the ages of zero and five years, providing a learner-friendly environment that was personalised and democratic, stressing fun and happiness. This involved construction toys, board games, electronic games, watching TV programmes together, playing games in the garden or park - business as usual in fact.
We located out-of-school clubs and activities such as Judo groups, holiday soccer coaching courses, holiday table tennis events, and provided transport for groups of friends to go skating in the evening. One 'bit of treasure in the wreck' was the Local Education Authority's Saturday morning orchestra facility. This encouraged young musicians to gain experience with their own or with loaned instruments, in beginner ensembles and, eventually, to the senior orchestra. The LEA also had an Outdoor Centre in Wales and an Arts Residential Centre which were sources of worthwhile week-long courses.
The local naturalist society had regular Sunday outings to gardens, arboretums, bird watching sites ranging from woodland, to moorland, to seashore - even to sewage farms where we could view birds such as black terns – all in the company of enthusiasts. On occasion, we found ourselves at the Gibraltar Point Field Station for a weekend of investigation where father gained 'brownie points' for being the first to notice a rare red-backed shrike. The 'I Spy' booklets were a useful cheap resource but another favourite purchase was the magazine, The Puzzler.
We organised our own day trips to seaside, to parks with fun-fairs, to houses, to cities and museums, to sporting events ranging from the local soccer and cricket teams to the world table tennis championships. There were National Car Shows and the Birmingham Show to experience. We involved ourselves in a local amateur dramatic society that welcomed children to help out backstage. Also, the family, including grandparents, would often come along to meet the families, when I was researching home-based education. There were package holidays abroad, to Sweden to visit friends and also to Spain.
Perhaps none of this seems all that remarkable, and families across the social range do some selection of these things, according to their means and inclinations. But we consciously saw all these activities as opportunities for purposive conversation and mutual learning and an antidote to the effects of schooling. We could try to provide holistic and integrated learning to offset the fragmented approach of the school, and use any opportunities to practice the democratic skills of negotiation, consultation, accommodation, and co-operation - the skills that authoritarian schools usually discount and discourage.
What was achieved? Well, perhaps partial success could be claimed. Just choosing to be there, transformed the experience. At seven years, our son was telling us that, 'school did not get to him like the others, because he had an escape tunnel ready and waiting'. At eleven, he went to the Open Day at the secondary school where 300 children from the feeder schools in the district were in attendance, but he was conscious of being the only one making a decision whether to go or not. The others were conscripts. Later, we saw the head teacher where my son informed him that he was giving the school a term's contract to see how things went. I came to realise that my son regarded the school in the same way that an anthropologist regards a tribe being studied – he was in the role of a participant observer.
The switch from school to further education college was eventually a considerable release from the domination of schooling, and independence of spirit and mind were better able to flourish. On the other hand, moving away to university meant that this institution just had a field day. The intellectual dependence Gatto talks about now asserted itself in the form of courses and modules requiring replication of approved material and rejecting any alternative or independent analysis as a threat to the authority of 'experts'. (During twenty years working in universities, this is what I observed happening as a matter of course, and pointing it out in committees was never well received.)
Is a damage limitation policy really necessary? And does every parent using schools need one? John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859, p177) observed that:
"A general State Education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another, and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body."
This seems to me to be just the opposite of an 'organic, toxin-free learning' outcome.
(First published in the Roland Meighan column of Natural Parent, Jan/Feb 2000 under the title of 'How to survive school'.)
15. 'Natural' Curriculum or National Curriculum?
'Natural' knowledge and a superstition called 'Subjects'
A curriculum can be defined, in simple terms, as 'a course of study'. Knowledge can be taken, for now, to be some kind of content that is the substance of a curriculum'.
The latest research on the brain tells us that babies 'hit the ground running' as active learners. Their brains are already programmed to begin their lifelong course of study by interacting with their environment - unlike a cow, say, that is programmed to work in set routines. Indeed, one definition of what it is to be human is given in the title of a John Holt book - we are human because we are Learning All the Time.
The 'natural' curriculum is the 'course of study' that humans develop as fast as physical and other conditions permit. So, babies accumulate knowledge through activities such as play, imitation, and interaction with any adults around. Play is best seen as children's work: one grandparent noted recently that her granddaughter, at the end of a refreshment and chat break, suddenly said, "I must get on with my play-work now."
The content of this natural curriculum is a set of existential questions. They include: Who am I? Who are you? Who are they? Where do we belong? Who gets what? How do we find out? Where are we going? How am I doing? Who decides what? It is a set of questions that stays with us permanently with the answers being reviewed constantly throughout our lives, as we assemble our tool-kit of knowledge. From time to time, we may engage with those attempts at systematic bodies of knowledge called subjects, to help provide some answers to these questions.
The question, 'Who am I?' will be redefined many times as a person passes through the roles of infant, child, adolescent, young adult, single person, couple, married person, parent, older person, and so on. When young children reach five, they are asking, on average, 30 questions an hour based on their natural curriculum. At this stage, one provisional answer to the question of 'how do we find out?' has been gained, by achieving competence in the mother tongue. Until quite recently in human history, this natural curriculum was sufficient to keep us going throughout life. But then
The story of the animals and the birdsThe animals and birds decided to create a school. They devised subjects for study which were climbing, flying, running, swimming and digging. They could not agree on which was most important, so they said: "Everyone must do everything - in case they need these things in the future".
The rabbits were expert at running, but some nearly drowned in the swimming class. The experience shook their confidence and they could no longer run as well as before.
The eagles were terrific at flying, but very poor at digging and were assigned to a extra digging classes. This took up more and more time, and some forgot how to fly well. And so on with the other animals and birds - moles became less confident at digging, otters at swimming.
The birds and animals no longer had the opportunity to shine in their best areas because they were all forced to do things that did not respect the natural curriculum.
The eagles got a bit fed-up with digging. They called a meeting of the birds.
"We need a curriculum suited to us birds," they said. All agreed.
"Nest building should be a core subject." All agreed.
The eagles spoke: "The best nests, 'real' or 'proper' nests, are made of twigs on high ledges, because they are the nests of us eagles - the 'high flyers', as you might say, with our 'high culture'."
Now eagles are big and powerful and liable to eat smaller birds, so that was somewhat reluctantly agreed.
So kingfishers and wrens and lapwings and swallows all tried to build nests of twigs on high ledges. It wasn't easy when you were used to holes in river banks, or weaving cocoon-like structures of grass and moss, or plastering mud under the eaves of houses.
What was needed was a stage of lower ledges - a kind of 'key stage one' of nest building.
"It might help," the eagles said, "if you wore our brown speckled uniform. Nobody seems to know why, but learning seems to go better if you wear a uniform. So, well done sparrows, you already have the right idea, but you kingfishers ... well, we love the gear, and all those nice bright colours ... but for learning, you will need to put on a brown speckled uniform." And so the experiment continued in brown speckled uniforms.
But, the swallows went south for the winter. In the rest periods they got to talking about the new birds curriculum. Nests on ledges were rather draughty. The ledges had got rather crowded and some bullying incidents had taken plac